Wednesday, June 21, 2017

I often encounter business
leaders and sales executives who get so immersed in their negotiations, that
they tend to overlook the obvious verbal or non-verbal cues, patterns,
preferences and team-dynamics of the people they engage with.

They become so fully
focused on the negotiation process, that they disregard these essential keys, which
could often help them to create better business deals.

In effect, these executives
have become blind to what expert negotiators view as essential information.

In business negotiations, you won’t get what you can’t
see!

I have come to view this as a side-effect of the respective executive’s
blind spot.

In medicine, the blind spot is the area in the visual field, which
corresponds to the zone on the optic disc of the retina in your eyes, where
there is a lack of light-detecting photoreceptor cells. The brain interpolates
the missing input-data, which is not available in the area of your blind spot,
based on information details gained from the surroundings, as well as
information obtained from the other eye, so that we are usually not aware of
the blind spot’s existence.

Similarly, in our personal blind spot, we may be unable to take in new
information, especially when faced with unfamiliar, complex, challenging
situations, such as intercultural business negotiations.

Our past experiences have shaped and cemented our beliefs, assumptions, and
expectations of how the world works to such an extent, that we have literally
become blind to what is really going on in and around us in such an area. We
interpolate, making assumptions about what is going on based on factors we are
no longer conscious of, forces at work in our blind spot which are no longer
under our control.

I always tell the
executives I coach to beware of the assumptions they make, and the stories they
tell themselves before, during and after a negotiation, for our perceptual
filters may play tricks on us.

Our mind is programmed to create coherence between our
deeply held beliefs and our perception of reality.

Our subconscious
mind sorts and filter the input data it receives, evaluating it based on its
existing map of the world, including its belief-structures, value-hiearchies
and fundamental needs. If our mind can’t find adequate references to back up
its deeply held beliefs, it may experience cognitive tension, to which it will
frequently respond by coming up with creative ways to bridge the gap. The
resulting mental shortcuts may be interesting and creative, but if they are
based on an insufficient, incomplete, or otherwise flawed perception of reality,
they will often lead to sub-optimal results. This is especially true in the
context of intercultural negotiations, where it is essential that we learn to
take our blinkers off.

In order to overcome
the negative effects of the blind spot in business negotiations, I usually
recommend the following steps:

Appoint An Observer

Whenever you are
negotiating as a team, make sure that you appoint one of the team-members as an
observer, and ensure that this person is well trained, prepared and fully able
to perform this role well.

Amongst other
things, the observer should take notes about the following factors in the
opposing team:

personal styles,
as well as the explicit and implicit roles of the team members

hierarchical
structures, team dynamics and possible switching of roles

The observer
should be given the authority to call for a time-out (obviously: not too
frequently!) during which he or she can share the observations and discuss
possible interpretations and required tactical changes with the team.

Activate Your Inner Observer

This technique
takes some practice, and may not be easy to learn initially, but if you find
yourself getting involved in complex negotiations frequently, you will benefit
from learning to activate your inner observer.

Essentially, this activation
process requires you to learn how to be fully present, focused and engaged with
your team and your counterparts during any given negotiation, whilst at
the same time being able to step out and above the situation to observe
everything that is going on in and around you (and no, I don’t teach OBE!).

When I tell my
executive clients how this works, the initial reaction I frequently get is that
their eyes glaze over and they give me a quizzical look, as though I were
trying to teach them some highly esoteric technique or concept.

However, once they
allow me to show them specifically how they can activate their inner observer,
and they gain a few initial positive experiences in real-life negotiations,
they tend to become more open to the potential benefits of using this approach.

Conduct A Post Mortem

I am often amazed
to see how many of my executive clients rush from one sales or business
negotiation to another, without stopping to reflect on what worked, what didn’t,
and why, as well as what they could learn from the experience they just went
through.

Furthermore, even
if they apply a proper debriefing process after each negotiation, I virtually
never see them share their insights with their business colleagues in a
systematical manner.

In many ways, the
learning organization still seems to be more of a myth than a reality when it
comes to business negotiations.

Beware Of Your Blind Spot!

Your blind spot usually is the direct result of your perceptual filters,
including your personal and business values, rules and beliefs. Understanding
what is really going on in your blind spot is often a critical key to creating
a real breakthrough in your business negotiations.

Find out more about how you can turn
your blind spot into your sweet spot at

Thursday, May 18, 2017

In
medicine, the blind spot is the area in the visual field, which corresponds to
the zone on the optic disc of the retina in your eyes, where there is a lack of
light-detecting photoreceptor cells. The brain interpolates the missing
input-data, which is not available in the area of your blind spot, based on
information details gained from the surroundings, as well as information
obtained from the other eye, so that we are usually not aware of the blind
spot’s existence.

Similarly,
in our personal or business blind spot, we may seem to be unable to take in new
information. Our past experiences have shaped and cemented our beliefs,
assumptions, and expectations of how the world works to such an extent, that we
have literally become blind to what is really going on in and around us in such
an area. We interpolate, making assumptions about what is going on around us,
based on factors we are no longer conscious of, forces at work in our blind
spot which are no longer under our control.

Most of
these subconscious programs were probably originally well intentioned, designed
and created to help, support and protect us!

But more often
than not, the forces active in our blind spot will sabotage our ability to make
effective decisions to change our life and our business for the better. I see
these forces at work virtually every time I coach corporate clients, executives
and business owners, although they are usually not consciously aware of what is
going on under the surface.

I frequently find that the forces active in the
blind spot include:

An
unwillingness or inability to engage in creative, constructive conflict, both
within the organization, as well as with external stakeholders

Emotional
disengagement or employee inertia, due to excessive change initiatives, project
overload, leadership fire-fighting, and an overall lack of direction

Negative
associations with projects, products and processes that failed in the past

Process
improvement know-how and employees’ implicit ability to make better decisions
on the shop floor than what the executives dream up in their ivory towers

Market
intelligence and intimate customer knowledge which is often left untapped even
by the most sophisticated CRM or touch point management systems

Game-changing
business ideas employees work on in their spare time, because they don’t
believe their company would value their input

Contacts
to thought leaders, political movers and shakers, potential business partners,
and possible affiliates which employees are acquainted with, but would never
share as contacts with their employer

Etc.

Your blind
spot usually is the direct result of your perceptual filters, including your
formal and informal business values, rules and beliefs. Understanding what is
really going on in your personal or corporate blind spot is often a critical key
to creating a real breakthrough in your business.

Find out more
about how you can turn your blind spot
into your sweet spot at

Tuesday, March 21, 2017

In our coaching practice I often meet executives and
entrepreneurs who have made several of the following 10 mistakes when
negotiating international business deals, creating huge opportunity costs for
their organizations as a consequence.

In this short post, we will take a closer look at these mistakes and present proven, pragmatic ways to avoid them.

Mistake #
1: Lack of effective scenario planning and preparation

Too many negotiators default to their personally
preferred standard procedure in negotiating deals, because this approach has enabled
them to succeed in the past.

If you find yourself getting involved in complex, international or intercultural
deals, your default home-country way of doing things may backfire. In such
situations, robust planning and
preparation is required, in which you take into account all of the
interdependencies and cultural factors influencing the deal, develop multiple
scenarios both at the strategic and the tactical level, and recalibrate or refine
your negotiation plan on an on-going basis during the actual negotiation, based
on the cultural and interpersonal
patterns you observe.

Experience shows that the best negotiators prepare
their interactions meticulously, which allows them to be more present, agile, powerful and effective
during the actual negotiations.

Mistake #
2: Not setting the scene properly

The best negotiators we have met over the years seem
to initially spend a lot of their negotiation time setting the scene, priming
their counterpart, framing their position, and anchoring the value their
product or solution offers.

If there is ONE
thing which seems to separate the experts from the amateurs in negotiation, it
must be the quality of the priming, framing and anchoring applied.

This is especially true for international,
intercultural negotiations, where framing provides a means of maintaining a
clear focus throughout the business conversations.

As the saying goes – frame or be framed!

Mistake #
3: Unclear team roles and responsibilities

Most negotiation teams we work with seem to fare
relatively well when it comes to appointing the lead negotiator and expert
roles.

However, we often find that despite all of the
power-mapping negotiation teams seem to go through during the preparation phase,
in order to better understand the power-distribution and interdependencies of
their opposing team, they relatively rarely map out who on their team will be
developing what type of relationship with which person on the other side. They
also rarely seem to consciously plan
who will be making which concession at what point in time to which person on
the opposing team.

In addition, experience shows that it is important to have
at least one person on your team charged with managing the agenda, timelines,
milestones and deliverables, as well as observing
and interpreting the potential changes in team-dynamics, roles,
body-language cues and priorities in the opposing team.

I am often amazed to see even highly experienced,
seasoned negotiators totally ignoring
the obvious body-language cues their counterparts share during the
negotiations. The danger here is that we get so involved in the conversation,
especially when the tension and complexity levels increase, that we no longer
consciously see what is really happening right before our eyes.

Mistake #
4: Lack of constructive conflict

Many business leaders and sales people seem to dislike
the conflict, tension and emotional stress, which are simply a natural
ingredient of most negotiations. Most professional purchasers and sourcing
specialists know this fact intuitively, leveraging tension as a strategic tool
during their negotiations, in order to destabilize the sales people.

The best sales negotiators we know have learned to
reframe such tension and use it as an opportunity to create innovative
solutions with their clients.

In the context of intercultural negotiations, it is
important to note that the amount, timing and the way in which trades are made
can differ significantly. Not using a culturally appropriate trading-style is
one of the main reasons why intercultural negotiations frequently stall or
become totally blocked.

By managing conflict, tension and concessions
strategies in a psychologically and culturally appropriate way, we can develop
stronger bonds with our counterpart and get them to invest in a solution we jointly own!

Mistake #
5: Ineffective management of complexity

When negotiations get too complex, the tension level
tends to increase fast, and the resulting sense of frustration can quickly lead
to dangerous black-or-white solutions, which usually don’t satisfy the
underlying needs of any of the parties involved.

Managing complexity usually requires us to limit the
number of negotiables we focus on at any one point in time. Experience shows us
that a range of 6 – 8 negotiables provides a manageable level of complexity which
most negotiators seem to be able to work with effectively.

However, experience also tells us that having too few negotiables is
just as bad as having too many. In both cases most negotiators tend to focus on
the obvious, quantitative negotiables more, which usually leads to a discussion
purely around price, rather than value.

Mistake #
6: Not preparing breakthrough strategies in advance

Handling tactics, power-play, and blocked situations on
the spur of the moment often doesn’t provide successful results, unless you
happen to have a long track-record and a wealth of relevant experience in business
negotiations, or if you are equipped with an unusually strong intuitive
guidance system.

We have seen even the most seasoned negotiators
getting into totally blocked situations, especially when tension levels
increase and their brain goes into fight-or-flight mode. A key breakthrough
strategy thus is to monitor and actively manage your personal emotional state, as well as leading your counterparts
towards a constructive process of creating common ground and co-creating a
mutually beneficial outcome. We suggest brainstorming potential breakthrough
strategies with your team in advance, as part of the scenario-planning, and
involving a seasoned negotiation coach where needed.

Mistake #
7: Selling and challenging instead of co-creating

Although there clearly are many exceptions to this
rule, we find that especially in Europe many business leaders do not like being
sold to. They also often don’t respond especially well to having their business
strategies, plans and activities challenged by sales-people (the Challenger
Sale approach often doesn’t work well in this part of the world). And
increasingly, we hear executives state that the win-win approach often
produces compromises which aren’t really satisfying.

One of our clients has even coined the term win-win
is for losers!

In today’s complex, multinational, multi-option,
multi-polar world, we need to go beyond cleverly crafted compromises, and
instead orchestrate the context for co-creating
more holistic, sustainable, truly satisfying solutions with our counterparts in
the business-negotiations we get involved in.

Mistake #
8: Not probing and checking assumptions deeply enough

We often find in our business negotiation coaching
assignments that our clients believe they have understood what their
counterparts really want – and they usually have already developed a whole host
of potential solutions for the perceived problem. It seems that many
negotiators enjoy the sense of satisfaction involved in the problem-solving
process. So as soon as they see a problem, they immediately start solving it.

This highly transactional problem-solving approach
often leads sales teams to present their clients with the perfect solution for the
wrong problem!

Even if you provide clients with exactly what they
asked you for, you may find that they are still not truly satisfied with what
you give them. Especially in complex business negotiations we need to take time
to check our assumptions and dig deeper, in order to understand the true
underlying personal and business motives, as well as the respective hierarchy of needs driving the dynamics
of the negotiation.

Mistake #
9: Not structuring the negotiation process effectively

Our negotiation coaches are often called to intervene
and provide support in negotiations that have become blocked – or totally
unstuck. One of the first things we do in such situations is to conduct a meta-negotiation
with all parties involved, to redefine or recalibrate the rules of engagement,
clarify the expectations, define the desired deliverables, develop a common
denominator, and agree on mutually acceptable ways to take the negotiation
forward.

Such meta-negotiations are especially
important and effective in the context of intercultural business negotiations,
as they help to create the common ground which is usually required, in order to
establish a sense of mutual trust and transparency. Creating such small but
significant incremental agreements, and linking them up logically, can provide
a quick and effective way to break
through blocked situations and to create solutions that satisfy the real
needs of all parties involved.

Mistake #
10: Ineffective deal closing and post-deal implementation

Many procurement professionals admit to experiencing
what they call purchaser’s remorse after closing a deal, especially if they
learn later that they could have got a better deal, if only they had fought
longer and harder.

The best sales negotiators seem to help their
procurement partners by putting together a sound business case and coherent, relevant business story (that
is why relevant storytelling is so
important in the sales process), enabling the buyers to make a better case for
their purchase within their own organization.

When I work with procurement specialists, they often
tell me that this is the most important
thing they would like to receive support with from the sales people they
meet. And at the same time it is the MAIN
thing they usually don’t get.

Tuesday, March 14, 2017

Once upon a time,
in the Wild Wild West, when thirsty cowboys would finally find a well
where they could draw water for themselves, their horses and their cattle, they
would find a flask or bottle of water next to the pump. In those days, the hose
which was supposed to transport the water up from the bottom of the well, was
often made of leather or a similar type of material, that would get dry and
brittle over time, if it was not used frequently. You could work the pump as
much as you liked, but it would not draw up any water for you, as long as the
hose was dry and brittle. So
you needed to gently pour the water from the bottle provided into the dry hose,
which would become moist and more supple in the process. And with that, the
cowboys could draw up as much water as they wanted.

This process was
called priming the pump.

Thus as a thirsty
cowboy, you had to first make a key decision when you got to the well:

Would you quench
your thirst immediately, with the water provided in the bottle?

Or would you
invest the water into priming the pump, deferring the
possible immediate gratification of quenching your thirst, but with the
realistic expectation of gaining much more of the precious water in return?

Using Psychological Priming Techniques In Negotiations

Psychological
priming techniques essentially leverage a tendency of our minds to take
shortcuts when faced with complex decision-making situations. It seems that our
mind can consciously juggle only four to nine bits of information at a time. If
we are faced with a vast amount of information and variables we need to take
into account when making a decision, we reduce the complex rush of input we
receive from the world in and around us into a shorthand version of reality.

Cognitive biases
are mental shortcuts we use to solve such data-overload situations. They speed
up the processing in our brain, but sometimes these shortcuts lead us to drawing
conclusions so fast, that we miss what is really important. We tend to look for
information that confirms our beliefs and ignore information that challenges
them. When pattern recognition fails, we create patterns of our own – the mind
fills in the gaps.

Every person,
experience and object we encounter triggers an avalanche of associations in our
mind, and most of the resulting thoughts, feelings and impressions are biased,
based on the shortcuts and mental maps of the world we have created in the past.

Psychological priming
takes advantage of these mental shortcuts, which works best if the person being
primed is not aware of it. Let us look at a
number of priming techniques which are frequently used by expert negotiators to
influence the subconscious decision making patterns of the people they find themselves
negotiating with:

-Affect heuristic:

First
impressions focus your thinking and directly affect any decisions you may take

-Recency
bias :

We
link what we think and believe to the most recent credible data we have
received concerning a topic

-Status & authority bias :

Data
and information provided or supported by a credible authority figure is
believed more readily

-Conformity bias :

Conformity
is a strong, subconscious survival instinct, e.g. conforming to norms,
majorities, statistics on best practise, market intelligence, what competitors
are doing, etc.

-Availability heuristic :

We
believe something to be normal, if we can find an example or a physical
representation of it, but don’t believe something exists (or that it is
possible), if we have never seen or heard it before. The more available,
concrete and credible a piece of information is, the faster you process it and
the more you will believe it.

-Confirmation
bias :

We
like to be told what we think we somehow already knew – this satisfies our need
to right

-Hindsight
bias :

Even
when presented with sensational new information, if it is presented in a
credible manner, we asume we really already knew what we just learned, and call
it common sense

-Introspection illusion :

We
like to believe that we really do understand our true motives, needs and
desires, and we like people who help us to maintain this illusion

-Choice supportive bias :

The
more expensive a purchase, the greater our loyalty becomes for it. An emotional
connection is created to something we view as being precious. Once they have
bought something expensive, people will fight very hard to defend their choice
and avoid purchaser’s remorse.

At first sight, each
one of these priming techniques may seem to be all too obvious, and easy to
detect. As expert negotiators know, the real power of priming comes into play
when you start stacking them, by using five, six or more of the techniques
simultaneously, swiftly and precisely, so that the conscious thinking processes
of the counterpart become overwhelmed. As a result, the priming messages slip
right past the conscious filtering process and speak directly to the
subconscious mind, where the real decision-making happens.

These techniques
are so powerful, that even if you happen to detect several of the priming messages
your counterpart may be applying during a negotiation, as long as he or she
stacks enough of them, one on top of the other, fast enough, and with
precision, your subconscious patterns will still be triggered.